It took me a while to find the pijul log view, because it’s named CHANGELOG (and folded by default, whereas I had the usual COMMITS pane open and was looking there). Consider renaming it to COMMITS ?

More context: I happen to have a git repo in $HOME for dot files. And I wasn’t aware of how VSC shows multiple VCS repos in the SOURCE CONTROL panel. And I had the SOURCE CONTROL REPOSITORIES pane hidden. So when I first tried this extension I saw hints of pijul and lots of git. (And even when only the pijul repo was showing in the panel, the git repo’s COMMITS pane remained, in addition to CHANGELOG.) It look a bit of fooling around to understand what was going on.

Hi Simon, this is an interesting point to consider. I originally chose the “CHANGELOG” label to be consistent with Pijul’s own terminology. I don’t think the Pijul book uses the term “commit” anywhere, so I think naming the change history panel “COMMITS” would be a strange choice, clearly catering to users coming from Git. Obviously, pretty much all of Pijul’s users will be coming from Git, so there’s certainly some merit in making the transition easier, but I think it’s equally important to avoid confusing users by mixing Pijul and Git terminology.

I’d rather leave the “CHANGELOG” label as is, but I’ll leave this discussion open if anyone else wants to express their preference. @pmeunier any thoughts?

Thanks Garett. Personally I think in the context of VS Code, with its generic UI designed to work for multiple VCS, it’s more important to follow their terminology and reduce friction for folks trying out pijul. Especially since doing otherwise means you end up with two unrelated VCS change lists visible at once.

(Also, “CHANGELOG” to me has a very strong association with the traditional singular CHANGE* file in software projects.)

I guess there’s a similar, though less pressing, issue with BRANCHES vs CHANNELS. I have the pijul repo selected, so only that one is showing in SOURCE CONTROL, but I still see both pijul’s CHANNELS and git’s BRANCHES. If pijul-vscode had reused BRANCHES to show channels, it would not have bothered me, and would have avoided showing panes from two VCS at once. I can understand you might object to the terminology shift.

As an alternative, is it possible for you to ensure the BRANCHES pane is hidden (only when no git repo is visible, I suppose ? I’m not experienced with the VS Code UI when multiple VCS are visible. And I suppose I’m unusual having a git repo in $HOME, but probably having a pijul repo inside a git repo will be quite common.)